


Five People They Don't Meet In Heaven

by psocoptera



Category: Lost
Genre: Gen, M/M, five things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-08-24
Updated: 2010-08-24
Packaged: 2017-10-13 22:56:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,136
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/142634
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/psocoptera/pseuds/psocoptera
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tales from the afterlife.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five People They Don't Meet In Heaven

**Author's Note:**

> Almost everyone in these stories is dead before the start of their story.
> 
> Characters, pairings, and approximate wordcounts by part:  
> I. Miles, Miles/Richard, Miles/other, 450 words.  
> II. Keamy, gen, 120 words.  
> III. Michael, gen, 3400 words.  
> IV. Jacob, gen, 2400 words.  
> V. Smokey, gen, 750 words.

I.  
When Miles dies he goes back and relives his childhood, to see what it would be like with his dad around, and then skips ahead to start working through the string of hopeless crushes that had punctuated his twenties and thirties: the drummer in their short-lived band, that cute barista, Captain Gault from the freighter (who in this life is the president of his condo association).

He spends a couple of years pining after Sawyer again, and then he goes on holiday to Tenerife and meets Richard. Richard is older, experienced, suave, and Miles is happy to lie back and let him lead.

(The first time, the real time, Richard was almost comically eager to be introduced to Miles' idea of a good time. It had turned out that he was centuries old but hadn't actually _done_ anything in all that time except run around in the jungle trying to avoid the worst of the inevitable violence and occasionally leave on brief, mysterious, and generally annoying errands. Once he'd extricated himself from the room of lawyers he'd summoned to sort out the Ajira mess, he'd agreed to everything Miles suggested he might like to try: yes, he would like a mai tai, yes, he would like to go scuba diving, yes, he would like to see the Louvre. Yes, Miles could tip him back onto butter-soft hotel-suite leather and leave him trembling; yes, Miles could spread him out on pristine white hotel linens and leave him spent. They'd hopped from city to city, resort to resort, flush with freedom and escape and diamonds, until Miles took them to Tenerife and Richard had left their room before dawn and come back after sunset and sat Miles down and told him very sweetly but firmly that Miles was a lot more fun than Jacob but it was time for him to take the reins of his own life and see what he could make of himself, thanks for everything. Miles had flown to Athens with an empty seat beside him and busied himself with antiquities and vice, feeling surprisingly lost, thinking hard about what he had said.)

On Tenerife, the second time, they drink a little, they dance a little, they have sex a lot, and it ends even more quickly and easily than it had the first time, with a hug and a handshake. And then Miles hardly gives him a second thought, because he's finally getting to the good stuff, London, his partner, the adoptions, the grandkids, the stuff he wants to remember and not just wrap up, the happy life that had bloomed for him when he finally put the island completely behind him.

II.  
Keamy dies, and dies, and dies. Violently, painfully, pointlessly.

"You should forgive him," Alex tells her father. "After all, Mr. Locke forgave you, and Mr. Goodspeed, and Mr. Abaddon, and - "

"Okay, okay," Ben says, holding up his hands in surrender, "I'll think about it."

"Plus Mom and I already forgave him, and if _we_ can - "

Ben has grown enough to see that she has a point.

Keamy finds his way to a monastery in Eddington (where once, Desmond Hume drank hundred-quid wine); Brother Campbell puts him to work in the vineyard. He begins to learn to sit in silence. "You have a long way to go," Brother Campbell tells him, and Keamy nods and keeps working his way down the long trellis of grapevine.

III.  
"Boo!" Hurley says behind him, and Michael jumps a little. He'd been staring out at the water wondering how Walt was doing and had, apparently, manifested without realizing it. He looks at Hurley a little reproachfully, who shrugs. "Sorry, dude," he says, "Just thought it would be funny."

Hurley trying to be funny is better than Hurley sighing with guilt every time he looks at him, so Michael tries for a reassuring smile. It's hard, when he can't feel his face ( _doesn't really have a face_ , part of him reminds himself), but he tries to remember what it felt like putting on a brave face for Walt, and Hurley doesn't recoil in horror, so that's something.

"So I had an idea," Hurley says, and Michael almost wishes he could claim to have somewhere better to be. He doesn't, of course; it's nice to check in on Rose and Bernard occasionally, but there's only so much he can take of their domestic mundanity; Hurley had asked him to stop haunting Ben, saying that keeping him constantly on edge whispering at him really wasn't helping anything; the polar bears get restive with ghosts around and it seems rude to keep upsetting them.

"Yes," he says reluctantly, "An idea?"

"Can you, like, talk to the other ghosts?" Hurley asks.

Michael considers. It's an interesting idea - much less painful than dictating an elaborate apology letter to Ana Lucia and Libby, and less humiliating than trying to see whether he can fly (he can't), swim (he can't), lift small objects, take off his shirt, or summon Beetlejuice (he can't, he can't, he can't, and he really wishes Hurley hadn't seen quite so many movies.)

"I don't know," he says. He sees and hears them, sometimes, when they're trying to reach someone, standing around in a circle shouting advice or warnings or just muttering about what idiots the living always seem to be, but they never interact.

"Well," Hurley says, "Could you try? Since we're not making any progress with, you know, helping you, I thought if I could figure out what makes you stuck, but not, like, Ethan, maybe that would help. And if we knew who everybody is who's stuck maybe there'd be a pattern or something."

Aha. This idea. Michael's actually already heard this idea - he'd been lurking and heard Hurley discussing it with Ben - but he doesn't want to admit that. (Ben had teased Hurley about already starting to make lists of people, that it was apparently some sort of compulsion of the job; Hurley had thrown a mango at him. It had been nearly as domestic as Rose and Bernard. Michael had thought he might feel angry, if he still had those kinds of feelings.)

"Can't you just talk to them?" he asks.

Hurley sighs. "I'm trying, but. A lot of them don't want to talk to me. And they don't all speak English, or Spanish, and Ben is teaching me Latin, but some of it really doesn't sound like Latin either."

"So what do you want me to do?"

Hurley frowns. "Can't you just, I don't know, talk to them ghost-style?"

There's no such thing as "ghost-style", but Hurley's been throwing himself into helping Michael since seeing off Desmond, and while Michael doesn't think he deserves the effort, he finds himself reluctant to shut him down entirely. Desmond had been easy - Penny still had ears in the Pacific and Widmore left comm gear in the Hydra, ta-da. Michael's tried to tell Hurley that there's nothing that can be done for him, but Hurley just insists that if he's the boss of the island now, it's got to be good for something.

So rather than argue, Michael goes off to look for ghosts. There's a group of soldiers he's sometimes seen in the jungle, Americans, he thinks, all crew-cuts and antiquated but familiar slang. He goes looking for them. Time doesn't mean as much as it used to, but Michael's pretty sure he wanders around for quite awhile before he spots them, and then as he heads towards them, they retreat, and he loses them quickly in the dense jungle. Chance, he thinks, but then it happens again, when he finally finds them again. The third time, he tries calling out; one of them calls something back, a racial slur, and that time he doesn't try to follow.

He reports back to Hurley, who suggests that there are usually some French guys hanging out at the radio tower and maybe they'd be friendlier. Michael doesn't speak French either, and, as he sort of expects, they leave when he approaches.

He thinks maybe the single ghosts might be more approachable than the groups, and tries them whenever he can find one. Some are silent when he says hello; some jabber at him incomprehensibly. They all move away after a moment or two.

As a result of all this, he almost doesn't realize what's happening when, one day, he drifts through the Ruins and sees someone who doesn't flee.

The two little shapes are huddled together at the base of the big column; they lift their heads as he approaches. They turn out to be a couple of white kids, a boy about as old as Walt the last time Michael saw him, and a girl a few years older. They say hello back and more or less don't ever shut up again afterwards or leave his side. Emma tells him their whole story over the next while - how they'd been on Flight 815, had crashed with Ana Lucia's section, been taken by Ben's people, and had lived the next few years in various locations until "a sudden big explosion" which Michael deduces must have been Widmore's missile attack on the people following fake-Locke. They both miss someone named Cindy intensely, Zach especially, who lets Emma do most of the talking but shows all of his feelings (of which he seems to have rather more than Michael retains) on his small face.

Cindy had been with them on the beach; Michael gathers from things Emma doesn't say that they'd all died holding each other. Michael relays this to Hurley, Zach and Emma momentarily distracted watching the waves at the beach, and they spend a moment just being baffled - what on earth could the _kids_ have done, but not Cindy, to not be allowed to move on?

"Something while they were with _him_ ," Michael mutters, but Ben, when questioned, denies any corruption of the innocent. "Of course they were out of my hands for three years," he adds in the insinuating tone Hurley hasn't quite squelched out of him yet.

"Oh," Emma says when Michael asks, "After we had to leave the houses? We were mostly just at the Temple. And it was like school all the time." She rolls her eyes but it's a little wistful. Michael's sure she would go back to those days in an instant, now that she really knows what it means to have nothing to do - he'd put on his hard hat again in a flash if he just had a job to do.

"You do have a job to do," Hurley reminds him, "You're taking my ghost census for me, remember?"

Michael knows perfectly well that Hurley has put together his own list by now, and, sure, something like 80% of it is just descriptions of apparent age, sex, and race, with notes like "pointed at me, seemed angry" and "that same language again?", but that's just like Hurley to try to make him feel useful. Hurley has always been thoughtful like that and becoming Island Guy hasn't changed him. He fiddles around with Widmore's comm gear until he figures out something complicated involving satellites and now they have internet every third Wednesday evening; he always does a Google search for Michael to see if they can find any new tidbits about Walt, and then plays a couple of YouTube videos for the kids.

Those tiny mentions of Walter Lloyd that occasionally show up on the internet are the clearest, sharpest moments in Michael's somewhat foggy days - he's listed as third in a creative writing contest, he's in a photo of the school fencing team. Michael boggles to see how old he looks. Hurley laughs and shows him pictures of the other kids - Aaron; Sun's daughter; Chip Hume, who Michael had seen very very briefly when Penny showed up to collect Desmond, although he hadn't been allowed off the boat; Sawyer's daughter, who Michael didn't know existed; and Juliet's nephew, who Michael _really_ had no idea how Hurley knew about. Hurley had just wiggled his fingers at him mysteriously. They're all growing up, turning from generic toddlers into little pint-sized echoes of their parents. Zach and Emma don't age, of course, and spending so much time with them, Michael sometimes forgets that elsewhere, off the island, time is still passing, that Walt is leaving the little boy he used to be further and further behind.

The occasional cracks in that timelessness are jarring. The kids spend a lot of time watching Vincent, who sometimes seems confusedly aware of their presence and will offer sticks that can't be thrown, a belly that can't be rubbed. Zach and Emma both obviously ache to give him a proper petting and Michael is impressed by how little they manage to whine about it, considering; when they do, he admits that he also would love to be able to stroke that soft warm back even one more time. The best they can manage is a sort of game of chase, Vincent tearing around between them as the kids move up and down the beach, but as time goes on, Vincent slows down, the back and forths get more methodical, then hobbling, and then one morning Vincent is gone.

Hurley and Ben bury him in the little graveyard, with Rose and Bernard and Jack and Libby and Locke (but not Michael and Zach and Emma, whose remains are scattered, obliterated, lost. Hurley's offered to put up markers but Michael thinks the kids would find it depressing). None of the three of them can really properly grieve, not deeply, but they mope. Emma reveals that she always secretly hoped that when Vincent died he would become a ghost with them, but, no; Vincent is free of whatever leash it is that holds them to the island, and deprived of his company, they try to fill the days watching the waves, playing stupid word-games, telling stories.

Sometimes Michael thinks that losing Vincent is the last change that's going to happen; Hurley doesn't seem to be following him in aging, and Ben too seems suspiciously preserved. They've achieved a stable state and from here on out things will just - continue. There are rare moments that stand out - Hurley's not above using the last of Ben's network of operatives to get them copies of Walt's prom pictures - but mostly every day is the same and Michael's stopped expecting anything else.

"Dude," Hurley says, "I am going to figure this out and free all of you, _do not give up_." Michael doesn't think Hurley will ever understand what it is to be a ghost. Michael watches him crisscross the island with Ben over and over; sees him learn the shoreline, the ruins, the magnetic hotspots. Hurley talks to the birds, braids shells into his beard, and seems to have figured out how to work the weather, or maybe just predict it. He tries endless experiments with Michael, making rings of ash for him to cross, asking him to try turning the wheel (he _can't_ , will Hurley never get that?). Hurley might think he's learning something; Michael isn't.

" _Can_ you learn?" Hurley asks. He's finally good enough in French to talk to the French guys, who turn out to be Rousseau's former colleagues with a tragic tale to tell, which is interesting but fails, in Michael's opinion, to shed any light on The Ghost Question.

Michael can't claim to be busy, so if Hurley is taken with the notion of seeing if he can learn French too, that pretty much means French lessons. It's impossible, though. The words slide away between one session and the next. Emma and Zach are crestfallen; they'd perked up at the idea of new language lessons. Languages had been big at the Temple, with the local polyglot, one Mr. Lennon, instructing them in everything from Japanese to Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Michael's heard this a thousand times, but Hurley apparently hasn't; he has one of his morale officer moments and suggests that they try teaching _him_ hieroglyphics, it would be great to be able to read the inscriptions in the ruins.

So they start teaching him hieroglyphs - they can't write to show him the signs, but what they do is, they go down to the Temple, and point on the walls, and tell him what they're pointing at, and Hurley copies them down and makes notes. Zach and Emma seem pleased to have something to do - Michael thinks they'd be thrilled, if they could be. There are inscriptions all over the island to help Hurley translate. They could be busy for months, maybe years, trying to figure out the words they don't know, trying to make sense of the alien grammar. Michael's mostly left out, but it's good to see the kids engaged in something. He never got to see Walt like this, never just sat back and watched him do his thing.

A couple of weeks in, things get even more interesting: one of the other ghosts drifts through and notices them, and freaks out. He yells, and leaves, and comes back with friends.

Suddenly things are happening fast: formerly stand-offish ghosts swarm Hurley and Michael and the kids, waving their hands excitedly, and they won't stop shouting and shouting. Ben gets used to the constant whispering noise and claims it helps him sleep, like a white-noise machine.

A whole bunch of rushed sign-making later, they have a workable translation system going involving a large grid of symbols that the ghosts and the kids can take turns pointing at, and they're pretty sure that the 80% of ghosts speaking that mystery language are all Egyptians.

This seems obvious in retrospect - who did they think made all those ruins in the first place? - but Hurley just laughs and says something sage about hindsight, and sets to work getting the ghosts to teach him spoken Egyptian.

There are hundreds of them. _Thousands_ of them had lived on the island, generation after generation, Hurley tells them, once he's fluent enough. The original ship had fled the Roman Empire - Michael had always thought Egyptians came way before Romans, but apparently the last traditional die-hards had clung on that long - when Christianity had been declared as the only religion. It turns out, weirdly, a few of the oldest ghosts even do speak Latin after all, but had been wary of Hurley all these years because they'd seen and heard him praying and thought he'd try to convert them to the Christianity they'd been fleeing. ("Um, no, dudes," Hurley had said, "Whatever's keeping your souls here, pretty sure it's not _that_.")

Michael and the kids like to listen in while the ghosts tell Hurley their stories - they can't understand the language, but it has a nice cadence, and Hurley always gives them the Cliffs Notes at the end. They're there the day Hurley realizes the common thread.

The Egyptian colony had known the smoke monster, the man who took different shapes: he'd advised them, guiding them to different places on the island, suggesting things they might build.

All the ghosts had worked with him, or had been near him when they died. Not everyone close to him became a ghost, not even most, but nobody who is a ghost now had not.

When he figures that out, Hurley sits down, hard, and Michael would too, but has to settle for strong language.

Can it really be true? That he's trapped here not for his sins, but by some lingering taint of that evil thing? He feels agitated, jittery; it's the most he's felt in years.

Hurley, though, is thunderstruck.

"Dude," he says, shaking his head, "Dude. I've been sort of afraid of something like that, but I just always hoped it would be something else after all."

Michael doesn't understand. They know the answer, or at least more of it, isn't that great?

"Desmond and Jack already turned off his powers and killed him," Hurley says, "If that didn't free you guys… I'm sorry, Michael, but we can't mess with the Heart of the Island for this. Not even… I'm sorry, man. We just can't."

That's that. And so Michael tries to resign himself again to his endless existence.

Hurley still gives him little updates about the younger generation. The kids all have mysteriously robust college funds and get admitted to a variety of high-powered programs and blog about their study-abroad trips to here and there. Aaron has, of all things, ended up in some kind of complicated love-triangle-threeway with Sun's daughter and Desmond's son, which Hurley swears he had nothing to do with. But Walt seems to fall off the net entirely, and the occasional possible Walter Lloyd always turns out, after more digging, to be someone else.

Michael has the same conversations over and over again with Emma and Zach; he's not sure he's doing any better with them than he did with Walt, but he has no idea how he would tell.

There are occasional castaways and improbable rescues.

Ben starts to get a little grey.

In 2049 there's a flash of purple and Walt steps out of thin air onto the beach. He's got a lion's mane of silver hair, he's carrying a staff, and he seems to be about seven feet tall. "Holy shit you're a wizard," Hurley blurts out.

"More of a psychopomp," Walt says, grinning, and Michael just stares and drinks in the sight of him.

He can _feel_ ; it's soaking back into him like water into a sponge. Grief and pride and love, for Walt, for Hurley, for Emma and Zach, beaming at Walt like he's the most amazing thing they've ever seen. (He is, he is.)

Michael wants to say a thousand things but Walt is _busy_ , asking questions of Hurley that Michael doesn't understand, but Hurley seems to. Walt doesn't quite walk into the jungle but moves sideways somehow; Michael can tell where he is, some ways off, a certain open field that never struck him as anything special.

He manifests there with the kids in tow.

Walt, with slashes and jabs of his staff, is writing cuneiform in the air.

All around him the ghosts are assembling, like Walt is a magnet and they're iron filings. All of them - the Egyptians, the Americans, the French, the many miscellaneous individuals and pairs that Michael never quite placed.

Walt waves them back, keeps working.

Hurley and Ben arrive in haste, Ben panting a little.

"Do you know what he's doing?" Hurley whispers to Michael, and yeah, Michael does: after all these years, of all things, Michael's boy is there to rescue _him_.

Walt, with a final flourish of his staff, strikes it hard upon the earth.

The air _splits_ with a flash of violet and stays torn. The ghosts all make the same involuntary sound, a drawn-out aaaah that must sound to Ben like wind over the grass.

Walt beckons to Michael.

"I never forgot you, Dad," he tells him, as Michael lines up, the very first in the line to walk through Walt's impossible purple gateway to _somewhere else_.

"Walt," Michael says. "Walt." He looks up at his boy and this is everything he ever wanted, to see him grown up into this man.

"Don't worry," Walt says, and to look at them, he could be the father, and Michael the son, "Just go, now. We'll have all the time together we need on the other side."

Hurley is crying and waving goodbye like a film star on an ocean liner and Michael has to smile, and he _can_ smile, he _is_. Zach and Emma behind him are telling him how he'll finally get to meet Cindy, how nice she is, how much he'll like her. They step through; they're gone.

IV.  
As the last of the fire's embers dims into nothing, Jacob figures he's about to be somewhere else. And suddenly, he is.

"Hurry up with those readings!" Dr. Chang snaps, and taps his pen loudly on the gauge. Jacob blinks: he's standing in some kind of white-walled lab, wearing a jumpsuit. He's holding a clipboard and a pen of his own. "What?" he says dumbly.

He'd never thought much about what might come after death, but somehow this isn't what he thinks he would have pictured.

Chang pushes him out of the way, muttering, and begins scribbling down numbers himself. Uh-oh, Jacob thinks, first day on the - job? - and already in trouble. But afterwards, once most of the other jumpsuit-clad workers have cleared out and the large machine returned to an idling state, Chang finds him and starts to patiently explain the many meters and dials.

He seems to be working for the DHARMA Initiative, specifically, their weather-control station. Jacob has never understood the appeal of controlling the weather - it's just the weather, it is what it is - but he does his best to perform his new job diligently.

This goes on for a few weeks, and then suddenly, he's somewhere else again.

"Grind finer!" The big man in the kilt, he recalls, was a master of medicines back during the building of the Temple. Jacob is sitting at a low bench; in front of him is a mortar and pestle, holding some kind of reddish-brown powder. On his left, another worker scrutinizes a paste of leaves, while the man to his right is sieving small stones out of dirt. They both seem focused on what they're doing, so Jacob starts grinding.

When they go on break, he steers the conversation and determines that he's part of a project to figure out whether the healing virtues of the Island can be localized to some particular indigenous mineral, water source, or plant. His left-hand coworker, especially, speaks in glowing terms about the miraculous healing that will be possible once they've identified the curative and learned to extract or distill it.

Jacob remembers this project now - one of his brother's ideas, one that he had thought best left alone, at the time, but he tunes out the workplace chatter about the results of this and that on so-and-so's ailment and follows the headman's orders until he jumps again.

He's still with the Children of Tawaret, but several generations later, after they'd finished building the wheel and started turning it. He's a scribe assigned to the priest-astronomers trying, with each turn of the wheel, to place themselves back in their tables of sunrises and solstices.

"I think it is steering us to the sun's home," one of the other scribes says one evening, over beer. "Sure, we know the sun doesn't literally set, it just goes around, but there are many indications of a rich land beyond the Westmost Isles."

"If the island is a ship, it's not sailing there," says another scribe. "Such a route would logically follow the equator, and the wheel takes us more south than west. I think it takes us to the Antipodes."

 _Literally, if your hand's on the wheel_ , Jacob thinks, and tries not to look too bored. He hadn't known that at this point the first time; he'd been nervous that his brother's machine posed a threat to the light, and people vanishing were just fewer people messing around in what they shouldn't be. He hadn't figured out about the exit until much much later.

The novice priestess across from him must be thinking, by coincidence, about the vanishing also, because she leans forward, intent, and asks the first scribe, "Would you turn it?" He mumbles something about if he was chosen. "I would," she says, "I don't understand the machine, but I think, to see it in operation, to stand in the wheelhouse, before you disappeared, you would understand… everything, maybe." She shrugs a little. "It's like the gods' window," she says, "Look in, and see their secrets!" She laughs at herself a little, but she has zealot eyes. Jacob's seen plenty of those. He knows enough about the machine to use the lighthouse (built just a few years later than this, along the same general principles) and he doesn't think it's particularly revelatory.

He switches times again a few days later, to the short-lived Russian mission investigating American Cold War activity, and lugs heavy equipment after Ilana's father until the team is abruptly killed by Widmore and co. And then he's back with DHARMA, assisting a group of scuba-diving biologists who argue passionately about whether they're really finding predominately Atlantic corals on this Pacific island and make him watch Jacques Cousteau movies on his time off.

This goes on time after time after time. He's the seventh man on the French expedition, everyone's fetch-and-carry boy. He makes bricks for the Wari, who have stumbled upon the discovery that his brother stays out of their houses when they mix certain kinds of ash into their adobe. (He remembers noting that at the time, one of the more interesting developments of the late first millennium.) He spends three days huddled in the bushes in the rainy season with four miserable stranded Tlaxcalan fishermen who are convinced they're in the underworld, in Mictlan, and keep wondering when their god Camaxtil is going to show up. Jacob has seen a fair bit of the afterlife at this point with no sign of Camaxtil and he's almost tempted to tell them that to see if it would shut them up. It's a relief when he jumps to a big outrigger meticulously paddling in and out around the entire coastline of the island so that their navigator can study the swells.

Polynesians had always been trouble; various groups had discovered the island some dozen times or more over the years, and they inevitably refused to accept their new identity as castaways and started building boats and studying the birds until they figured out how to leave. Jacob had accepted and even brought them deliberately at first, as much as anyone else opportune, until one particularly enterprising group had not only gotten away but come back, with twice as many canoes, and gotten away _again_. He'd had to work fast to swamp them and their crews of eager young apprentice navigators before they got home and came back with a village. There'd been long-term settlements before and since, but the island seafarers were just too hard to contain, he decided, and after that he'd stuck to bringing in northerners and land-dwellers and cityfolk, people who didn't know the stars and depended on easily-confounded navigational gadgets.

This particular voyage is before that, though, much earlier, and the navigator's fascination with the strange currents is tempered with wariness of the big cloud of smoke they've seen on shore, which does not behave like any smoke they've seen before. The consensus seems to be that it's some kind of new and likely dangerous volcanic emission and best avoided, and they make only short, urgent stops on land for water and fresh fruit. Jacob shifts out on one of these stops and wonders, fleetingly, whether they notice.

He's not the kind of guy to question these things, but it's slowly growing more strange to him that not one of these varied groups has ever recognized him as an outsider, not even the four Tlaxcalans or six French researchers who could hardly have thought they just hadn't noticed him before. It gets even stranger three instances on when he looks up from a glossy conference table and realizes he's sitting directly across from Richard. Someone else is talking but Jacob can't help letting some little sound of greeting escape. Richard glances over at him, frowns slightly, and looks back at the speaker; it's absent, vaguely annoyed, and completely lacking in any familiarity.

That's… unsettling. Jacob tries to focus: if Richard doesn't know him, he must be here with someone else. Belatedly, he starts to listen to the man talking.

"… inconsistent with radiation exposure," he's saying. "The most similar symptom cluster in the literature is found in studies of rat gestation in microgravity…"

Jacob is making an effort to follow, but he can't help looking at this unfamiliar Richard, who has never before ignored him when he was in the room. Richard's eyebrows have gone up and he's scribbling something on the notepad in front of him; it's trivial for Jacob, who has seen rather a lot of it, to read his handwriting upside-down: _grav anomaly?? DHARMA measured? why EM/time and NOT gravity?_

Jacob smirks a little - who knew that Richard cared about stuff like that - and then spends the rest of the week apologizing to the speaker, who turns out to be his boss, for being disruptive during their big presentation to Mittelos. Not literally the entire rest of the week; he also sits in on two lab meetings, a "journal club", and a talk by some other visiting scientist. No one seems to be paying close attention to whether he's fulfilling his job duties - no one has actually mentioned what they are - and it's the first of the jumps that's taken him off the island. There's a restaurant near his apartment and he seems to have money, so he enjoys leisurely dinners until suddenly he's looking at a bone fishhook instead of his plate.

He skips around some more, gets stuck in the Pearl making notes for two weeks. He works on building a church with some Jesuits until his brother wipes them out. There's a particularly severe time disjunction in the early 1900s when a company of Scandinavians (Hanso offshoot, Spiritualist medium, Krakatoa-obsessed seismologist, etc) stumble upon the island; he lugs equipment for the seismologist, who wants to take advantage of the island being more than a day ahead of the rest of the world by erecting a radio antenna, watching his instruments, and broadcasting earthquake warnings. Jacob has mostly been tuning out these sorts of trivial concerns to concentrate on just doing whatever task is expected of him, but Richard's question marks have stuck in him somehow, like little barbs, and he finds himself actually listening to the man and thinking _huh, could that work?_ He remembers Krakatoa, of course - the island had been in the Indian Ocean when it happened, and he remembers the bang of the explosions and the waves and the ash. He'd had Richard get someone to move the island when the first bodies had washed ashore. Now he pays attention while the seismologist talks about vibrations and tsunamis and he's genuinely sorry when his brain turns to jelly from the time effect.

After that he's on the little island, after his people had taken over the DHARMA station there. "No, seriously," Colleen is saying, "If they could train them to pull a lever, why _not_ train them to turn a wheel? It shouldn't have to be one of us."

"That is how it is done," Bea says quellingly, but Jacob finds himself working with Colleen to redesign the fish biscuit dispenser. He recalls from the first time that she'd done this - he'd been annoyed by the unscheduled move, when she finally tested a trained bear, and had asked Richard to deliver a strongly-worded message that the island was not to be moved frivolously. This time, though, he finds it charming. Colleen has no idea how the wheel can possibly work and is curious whether intentionality matters or whether the polar bears, oblivious to their purpose, will still be able to to initiate a move. Jacob wants to tell her how some of the Egyptians wondered the same thing and tried sending in ignorant and misinformed turners until a more conservative faction declared it blasphemous. But she doesn't really need to know that; her experiment will end after that first trial, and the polar bears released to live wild on the island… he still finds himself glad she got to try it once and find out.

He jumps from the cages to the Lamp Post, where he's holding cables while a pair of Japanese geologists are installing some new piece of equipment under Eloise's watchful eye.

"What we want to know is how _much_ of the island moves," one of them explains. "It never appears on a continental shelf, so we assume significant undersea bulk. But is the identical volume moved each time? Or can it leave a stamp, or scoop out a divot, depending on the exact contour of the pre-existing seafloor?"

 _Huh_ , Jacob thinks. He'd never thought about that. Of course the island he knows must be just the top of a larger mass. The coastline doesn't change much between moves, though, so sea level must always end up in the same place. Maybe the slope of the underwater part can change, flatten out or get steeper, to always bridge the surface and the ocean bottom no matter how deep it is? "Maybe the island can only move to suitable locations," he says, "Where it's the right depth to get the height right… that would explain why we end up in certain areas over and over again, and never in others?"

He's grinning, thinking about it, and then he realizes that he's just said this out loud.

The Japanese geologists are staring at him, and Eloise too, and then she starts to smile, and they slowly start to clap. And then more people are appearing, Pierre Chang, the seismologist, Polynesian voyagers, the Wari, the Tlaxcalans, filling up the room and turning to him and applauding until it's an almost overwhelming ovation. People are laughing and crying; money seems to be changing hands between the French team and some of the Egyptians. "I knew he'd get it eventually," he overhears.

His mind is churning with two thousand years of questions, and now that they've been uncorked there's no stoppering them up again. Not just the obvious, "what _is_ all of this," he asks, but _everything_ : "Why ash circles," he asks, "But not volcanic ash in the air? Why don't the birds ever get sick from temporal displacement? Who told my mother about the heart of the island and gave her the job of guarding it? What's down there, anyways?"

Chang comes and pats him on the back. "Welcome to the club," he says fondly, and takes Jacob's arm as if to lead him somewhere. Jacob just hopes that wherever they're going, he'll get some answers.

Around him, the assembled castaways try not to smirk.

V.  
He falls, expecting to hit, but instead he's caught midair, and then he's flying. He floats forward easily away from the cliff, out over the open ocean like he's never been able to do, and speeds up as he leaves the island further and further behind him.

This has always been the best part of losing his body; the freedom, the weightlessness, the motion; people dream of this. The island has vanished behind him now and there's nothing but sea and sky and himself suspended halfway between them. He might be hanging, static, between the two vast expanses of blue, except for little waves zipping by below him, and then a smudge blooms on the horizon ahead: _land_. It blows up rapidly from a dot to a band along the rim of the sky, and then broadens, white sand, green trees, hills behind. And then he's _there_ , over the sand in an instant and skimming over the tops of trees.

The land rises away from the coast and he goes up with it, climbing faster and faster over stone thrusting up through the hills, steeper and steeper, until he looks up and sees dazzling mountain peaks. And then he's blasting through streams of tiny powdery snowflakes, blowing down in the wind. The snow is suddenly below him as he crests the peaks and zooms down the far side, still gathering speed.

There's desert below him now, taupe and umber, and little twinkling streams of lights in the dim. He dips down to see the specks resolve into double-cones, and curves broadly, swooping, to follow the arc of the road. Cars flicker under him as he races ahead of them in his hurry to see their destination. He sees the glow up ahead, amber and green, and then he's flying through the streets of a city, and then in another instant it's gone. More green, jungles and grasslands, and then he's out over ocean again.

All this time he's been accelerating, and his speed is so great now that he begins to stretch, as if his trailing parts can no longer quite keep up with his fore. He's spun longer and longer as he streaks over the water and when he makes land again he realizes it gives him time to _see_ , to look his fill, while still rocketing forward.

And, oh, the things he sees. Sprawling cities and soaring glass towers; boats bobbing in harbors; domes and arches and pyramids. Fields like quilts and dams like cliff faces. People everywhere, in ones and twos and queues and mobs, crowding marketplaces, dancing on plazas, cheering in arenas for sports teams in their colorful costumes. He follows roads whenever he can, mesmerized by the unthinking coordination that lets thousands of people come together to whiz along in close parallel; and even better, bridges, lifting those people up into open air. He finds one marvelous place where bridges plunge beneath the surface of a blue bay and skitters delightedly as he shoots through the tunnels, stitching himself up and down through the surface of the water without ever touching wet. He flies over ruins half-swallowed in jungle and an archipelago of man-made islands like a tiny world in miniature. He sees the bones of the Rome he once dreamed of under the beautiful encrustation of two thousand years. Finally he turns up, where people criss-cross the sky in planes like he only ever saw falling, and past, up through the blue to the black where a few lonely explorers, the farthest-out tip of humanity, circle the globe in a metal ship, and further still, out where there are only scattered busy machines.

At last he stops, hovering, still. He looks down and he can see himself: he's drawn into a thin tight thread wrapped over and over around the world. No one living will ever see a tenth of the places he touches. A moment more to gaze, then he begins to contract, gathering in his distant end, watching it whip across the faces of the continents as his long self returns to him. At last his final coil unwinds, and in an instant the last dangling noodle of self is slurped up, and he is compact again. He hangs a thousand miles up, looking down at his round blue world. His home.

He cherishes it, and he lets it go.

Behind him, opening up, he sees a new direction where he hasn't been yet; he goes there.


End file.
